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Ernest Hemingway’s life in pictures

Ernest Hemingway still seems larger than life more than 50 years after his death. Although his life is filled with legend and myth, there are some basic facts that cannot be disputed. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. After a few months as a journalist on the Kansas city Star, he became a Red Cross Ambulance driver in Italy in World War I and was wounded by mortar fire. It was his first of many contacts with the military and war zones.

In 1922, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and they moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published in 1926. After divorcing Richardson in 1927, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer and they divorced after Hemingway’s return from reporting on the Spanish Civil War, which inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Martha Gellhorn became his wife No.3 in 1940 – that marriage lasted four years and until he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II. Hemingway, ever the man of action, again worked as a war correspondent and was present at the Normandy Landings and the liberation of Paris.

After the publishing The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa and was almost killed twice in two plane crashes on successive days.

Aside from writing books that will be forever be remembered as iconic pieces of American literature, Hemingway enjoyed the most manly of pursuits from heavy drinking to hunting and sport fishing. He travelled widely and lived in Key West, Cuba, and Idaho where he killed himself in 1961 with a shotgun.